Climate Change Week in Review Week Ending December 1, 2017

This week began with an extraordinary call for direct action against oil pipelines (non-violent sabotage) published on the opinion page of The Guardian Friday. Emily Johnson, a defendant in several criminal actions in various States of the United States, claims the defense of “Necessity,” that is, she argues that her actions are legally justified because such sabotage is the only remaining way for the human race “to reduce emissions boldly and fast” and to avert apocalypse.

Also this week, General Motors has announced a new family of electric vehicles, and Reuters has reported that the oil world’s largest oil companies, the “majors,” are getting into the shale-oil business in a big way at last, overcoming a years-long reluctance.

Finally, research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests a new hope. It tells us of a new means by which carbon dioxide can be taken out of the atmosphere and turned into fuel. That may suggest that the profit motive itself offers a non-apocalyptic solution to the problems caused by the greenhouse effect, and that inference could be a problem for Ms Johnson’s Necessity defense.

Emily Johnson Makes her Case

On Friday, November 24, Emily Johnson’s name appeared on an opinion column in The Guardian headlined, “I shut down an oil pipeline – because climate change is a ticking bomb.”

There are five pipelines that carry tar sands crude oil into the United States. A group of five activists including Ms. Johnson shut down each of them in 2016 by using emergency shut-off valves. They were arrested and charged with crimes in four states. Three of the trial judges have refused to allow them to argue the necessity defense as described above. But the fourth, a judge in Minnesota, has allowed such a defense.

Ms. Johnson is happy about this, because even only one victory out of four attempts does mean that there will be one opportunity to put energy policy on trial, to present expert testimony indicating the immediacy of the threat from climate change and the connection of that threat to these pipelines. This case will proceed, as she observes, in a country where the affected pipeline company, Enbridge, “is the single largest property tax payer.”

“When it comes to climate change,” she says, “there’s little enough to be heartened by” so one may as well regard this judicial decision, allowing her defense, as heartening.

GM to go Head to Head Against Tesla

As Joann Muller observes in the Forbes auto blog, General Motors is committed to bringing to market a new family of electric vehicles that will be 30% cheaper to manufacture than the current Chevrolet Bolt EV.

It attributes its ability to make this commitment to breakthroughs in battery technology, as they are expressed in its new modular EV platform, which will launch in 2021, and will be the basis for at least 20 new and battery powered vehicles within two years after that.

Ms. Muller is Forbes’ Detroit bureau chief. She has also written for Business Week and the Detroit Free Press.

As she observes, the new platform will “be flexible enough to accommodate nine different body styles in multiple sizes, segments and brands in the U.S., China, and elsewhere.”

Of course Elon Musk’s Tesla has become associated in the public mind with the prospect of mass marketed EVs. But Tesla’s Model 3, which launched last summer, remains stuck in what Musk himself calls “production hell,” and the company has thus far delivered a grand total of 260 such cars.

As the headline above Muller’s piece expresses the point, GM “plans to bury Tesla with onslaught of electric vehicles that will – gasp! – make a profit.”

This may in the end illustrate the dangers of being a pathbreaker. You break the path not only for yourself but for your deeper pocketed undertaker.

Majors in the Shale Oil Business

Another business-world lesson involving pathfinders and potential undertakers comes to us this week from Reuters, which reminds us that the so-called “Majors” have been reluctant to get involved in shale oil, in the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) that has allowed peripheral players to make new use of once-abandoned geological formations such as the Permian Basin.

Such formations have been left to the little guys, scrappy nothing-to-lose players such as Mitchell Energy and Brigham Resources, who have made a lot of money as a consequence.

But such money draws attention, and the Majors are no longer above this fray. They no longer prefer their offshore operations. Royal Dutch Shell, for example, has launched what it calls iShale, which (in the words of the Reuters story by Ernest Scheyder) will adapt the technologies used in its “highly automated offshore operations to shale” and will pursue “advances in digitization that have reshaped industries from auto manufacturing to retail.”

The Reuters story also references Chevron, another Major, which “is using drones equipped with thermal imagine to detect leaks in oil tanks and pipelines across its shale fields, avoiding traditional ground inspections and lengthy shutdowns.”

Carbon Dioxide

On Wednesday, November 27, Science Daily reported on the work of researchers at MIT, who have developed a new system for turning pollution into fuel, turning “power plant emissions of carbon dioxide into useful fuels for cars, trucks, and planes, as well as into chemical feedstocks for a wide variety of products.”

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is not in itself new, but the new system developed by MIT postdoc Xiao-Yu Wu and Admed Ghoniem, the Ronald C. Crane Professor of Mechanical engineering, looks to be a promising addition to the “suite of technologies” collected under that heading.

The process uses materials that oxidize so easily that draw oxygen atoms through a membrane. The capture of a single oxygen atom in this way turns carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide on the other side, and the membrane itself “prevents the oxygen from migrating back and recombining with the carbon monoxide, to form carbon dioxide all over again.”

It is the carbon monoxide that can then be employed as fuel.

The researchers are now working on measuring how this membrane based process “compares to other approaches to capturing and converting carbon dioxide emissions, in terms of both costs and effects on overall power plant operations.”

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